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Comment by Max-q | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, it’s likely due to European regulations that a US newspaper has about zero interest in complying with, or even bothering to pay a lawyer to figure out.

I'm pretty sure he means to say that if you have zero interest in complying with EU law, are your European visitors actually important to you?

Blame the lawyers. One website is not representative of the entire USA, but yeah in general I prefer European hospitality.

Archived version:

https://archive.ph/e65vQ

No, this message is as american as it gets. What they are really saying is "We are not allowed to profile and sell the data of european visitors like we do with americans because of the GDPR, so they are not relevant to us". This relentless commercialization and lack of privacy is not exactly new.

Or it could be “We are a local news organization that rarely has EU traffic so paying a law firm to advise us on GDPR compliance would be a negative ROI.”

Some laws have unintended or unforeseen consequences. Use archive.today or archive.org if you want to view the article.

Can there be enough European visitors to a Florida local paper for them to care about monetization?

I agree with those who say that this is just a worry about having to field GDPR notices from Europeans who have no actual power over them now. But if in the future the paper is bought by a conglomerate that also has a European branch, there might be liability for past acts.

I totally agree, it probably doesn’t make sense to a US news site to put work into complying with GDPR. Totally fine.

But why then say that I’m important to them?! I’m the opposite. I’m not important to them, and that’s ok. No need to lie about it.

Ignoring your snark, entitlement, and arrogance for a moment, it's a local Florida paper. Complying with GDPR isn't free. They likely don't get enough EU visitors to justify spending the money. Would you rather they put up a less polite message?

Yes. An honest one. “Due to the complicate GDPR rules of the EU, we are unfortunately not able to serve visitors from the the European Economic Area.”

Don’t you find quite insulting when companies lies straight to your face to be polite? It’s not even their fault. Just tell it like it is.

This is probably the biggest cultural divide between the US and Europe.

No, not when it's stupid stuff like this. It's a harmless attempt at politeness and there are basically no stakes. It's not worth feeling insulted over.

I'm thinking you're reading way too much into a message that some intern probably threw together in 5 seconds and nobody has looked at in ages.

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